Outdoor movement in Hackney Marshes
These sessions are an invitation to move with the landscape rather than through it — not using it as a backdrop, but meeting it as a co-creator, a companion, a guide. Held in Hackney Marshes, we explore what it means to let our bodies be moved by the city’s wild places — to feel, listen, and respond as if for the first time.
Here, in the woods or in the fields, we practise softening our boundaries and attuning to the textures of place. Like a weed pushing up through pavement cracks, we explore what it means to find the feral in ourselves — not in escape, but in contact. We learn not to grab at nature for our use, but to become part of the ecology that is already here.
This is not about fitness or performance. It is about reanimating the senses. De-domesticating attention. Letting the city’s wild edges remind us how to belong — not through domination, but through humility, reciprocity, and presence.
Sessions last between 1h 30mins and 2 hours depending on the weather.
All sessions will happen no matter what the weather. You will be expected to bring waterproofs top and bottom if it rains, warm layers if it’s cold and hat, sun cream and light clothing if it’s hot.
Next sessions in 2025
Friday 16th May 10.30 – 12.30am
Sunday 22nd June 10 – 12am
Sunday 27th July 10 – 12am
Sunday 3rd August 10 – 12am
If there are no new dates advertised, feel free to contact me by email or sign up to my WhatsApp group to find out when the next classes are.
You might also want to join my Moving with the seasons year group where we move monthly for a year in the same spot in Hackney Marshes throughout the seasons.
What to expect
Each session begins with a gentle arrival into the space — a pause to land, to notice, to breathe. We’ll move slowly at first, awakening the senses, inviting curiosity, and allowing the body to follow its own impulses. You’ll be guided into dialogue with the landscape, the weather, the season and what’s alive around us through movement prompts.
There will be moments of shared movement and time to be alone in the landscape. You’ll be invited to find expression from a place of receiving.
We will work with both moving and witnessing — allowing ourselves to be seen in our raw, responsive movement, and learning to hold space for others with quiet attention. These roles are not fixed; we flow between them, allowing witnessing itself to become a form of embodied dialogue with the land and each other.
All bodies are welcome, and no previous movement experience is needed.
Potential benefits
- Reconnecting to your body as part of the living world
- Awakening senses dulled by screens, speed, and concrete
- Shifting from control to collaboration — with land, with gravity, with the moment
- Developing practices of listening, presence, and reciprocity
- Finding rest from internal noise through attunement to the more-than-human world
- Cultivating creativity, playfulness, and new ways of being in movement
- Cultivating presence through moving with rather than through landscape
- Building resilience and belonging through connection to place
- Resourcing yourself through the quiet company of trees, wind, water, and sky
- Finding freedom in wildness — not as escape, but as return
These sessions are a small act of rebellion against domestication — a remembering that we, too, are nature, and the wild is already within reach.